Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble

Greetings one and all, and apologies again for my unpredictable disappearances.  This time around I was attempting to get a new job.  Alas, all I got for my efforts was a week of stressful interviewing, a near miss, a mega-dose of bitterness, and a growing conviction that working for my current organization is an untenable situation.  Well, I guess everybody needs a wake-up call to get off their butts once in a while.  I hope it's not too "pie in the sky" of me to imagine that there might be a job out there for me that is either really enjoyable (if low paying) or, you know, at least have a career path that doesn't immediately dead-end upon hire.  And yes, I'll probably delete this once I put my next application in, but first I need to re-learn all my lost and wandering Excel skills, so it can stay a while.  *sigh*

Anyhow, enough grumping, it's time for the ever elusive book review!

So, Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble.  You might perhaps remember my gushing over the pretty cover.

Exhibit A:

 

See....pretty, right?  Anyhow, my brain was apparently washed by all the pretty because I requested this off of Wm Morrow Paperbacks blogger outreach list without any sort of contemplation about whether I would, you know, enjoy things about the book that aren't the cover.  After reading the prologue which was so cheesy I may have actually rolled my eyes, I had a few doubts.  However, I figured since I am a jerk who apparently chooses her review books based on cover alone and have no one to blame but myself, I supposed I'd better at least give it the fifty pages I owed it.  As I suspected, it didn't magically transform into a breathtaking work of literature, but happily, it did turn into a sweet beach read (for the non-beach goer) with lovable characters and a sweet (if predictable) plot.

Documentary filmmaker Abbie Sinclair is deeply damaged after her latest project ended in tragedy.  Luckily for her, her best friend stateside has a few elderly relatives who are happy to host Abbie in their crumbling seaside mansion while she figures out what comes next.  Cabot Reynolds the Third is a man who gave up a promising career as an architect to return to the down and out South Carolina beach town of Stargazey Point to restore his uncle's carousel and, hopefully, breathe new life into the town before its natives are forced to sell out to developers.  The elderly Crispin siblings are Stargazey Point's old money, but their funds are quickly disappearing.  The three have fallen to selling off their belongings to pay off their taxes.  Despite their troubles Abbie finds a home with Millie, Marnie, and Beau, and before long she finds that she doesn't have to jet around the world to keep up with the deeds of her over-achieving, do-gooder family members, there's plenty of good to be done right in Stargazey Point.

What to say about Stargazey Point?  It's a stereotype in the best possible way.  It's a town that has been plunged into hard times by a few too many storms, where taxes are still sky-rocketing forcing natives out in favor of soulless, big-money resorts.  It's peopled by a pack of well-intentioned, incredibly meddlesome southern ladies who are at the ready when it comes to pushing this damaged stranger to rediscover her purpose.  All it takes is a little boost from a guy who favors his small-town roots to his big-city career and a woman who seems to know how to draw out the best in people even when she can only see the worst in herself, to give the struggling natives of Stargazey Point the incentive they need to embrace their town's heritage and make it new again.

The plot is a little too contrived, most of the characters are a little too saccharine, the "deep, dark" secrets are little too close to the surface, and the cynics are a bit too easily won over, but Abbie's story is addictive nonetheless.  There's always something compelling about a person finding healing, redemption, and love after tragedy, even more so when she's entwined in a town filled with exaggeratedly loveable characters finding its feet again.  The town of Stargazey Point jumps off the page, and Abbie's story is just the sort of easy-reading, satisfying tale that reads best on a lazy summer day.

(Thanks to William Morrow Paperbacks for providing me a with a copy in exchange for my honest review.)

 

Rutherford Park by Elizabeth Cooke

I feel like I'm always telling the same story.  You know the one about the book that somebody pitched me for review that I accepted, and once it arrived in the mail I had second thoughts and wondered what on earth had taken hold of me that I accepted it, and blah, blah blah and so on?  Well, I've done it again with Rutherford Park. I'm always in for good historical fiction, but not so much the Lords and Ladies cavorting about with their awesome wealth and occasionally scandalous problems.  I've never gotten around to cultivating an interest in Downton Abbey either (though I've been told in no uncertain terms that I should) which, apparently, would put me right in the demographic that would have this book marketed to them.  That said, despite it being the sort of book with the Lords and Ladies and scandals marketed toward an audience of a show I don't watch, something about Rutherford Park caught my eye and landed it on my doorstep.  Perhaps the fact that it takes place in the moments before the outbreak of World War I, perhaps it's just been a few minutes since I'd read any good historical fiction and I was feeling weak.  Happily, the story ends (as it usually ends) with my enjoying the book a good deal more than I expected to when I was busy second-guessing my decision.

Rutherford Park is the palatial home of Lord William and Lady Octavia Cavendish.  Nestled in the Yorkshire countryside, the peaceful-appearing estate is an island unto itself, but the secrets that run deep among the Cavendish family and their staff  and the coming of war threaten to fracture the idyllic, if suddenly fragile, life the aristocratic family has come to know.  As World War I looms on the horizon William struggles to maintain his family and their refuge at Rutherford Park even as his nearest and dearest seem to be moving beyond his grasp.

In Rutherford Park, Cooke allows us to sneak a peek beneath the proper and orderly surface of the Cavendish family and their estate.  William takes comfort in order and propriety, but his wife Octavia chafes at the bonds of what is considered appropriate behavior for the lady of the house.  She longs to show her love effusively, to walk barefoot in the grass, to cuddle her children instead of resigning them to the staff to raise, but William despite being well-meaning is embarrassed by her improper behavior.  The couple's children, Harry, who wants nothing more than to fly away from an indiscretion that ended in tragedy; naïve Louisa, who is about to make her debut in society, and Charlotte, the youngest daughter who might just be a budding activist for change are each slipping away from William and Octavia in their own ways.  As William rushes to gather his family back to himself and to the safety of Rutherford Park in the days before the war, past indiscretions and current scandals threaten to undo the life he and Octavia have built together.

In such a book as Rutherford Park, it might be tempting for the author to focus solely on the Cavendish family.  Their feelings and foibles certainly could a whole book make.  However, Cooke makes the wise decision to take on the estate as a whole exploring the lives of the many servants who keep the wealthy Cavendish household up and running.  From the housemaids, Mary and Emily who made their escape from the dangers of mill work only to come face to face with other heartbreaks, to the footman, Nash, who delights in the occasional book of poetry pilfered from William's library, to the farrier, Jack Armitage, who shared an unexpected and perplexing moment with one of the Cavendish daughters, Cooke breathes life into the whole breadth of characters that make Rutherford Park tick.  The result is a book that quietly explores the beginning of the end of a way of life through the co-mingled lives of a family whose wealthy way of life is becoming unsuitable and unsustainable and the people whose existence as mere servants is slowly drawing to a close.

Rutherford Park is an unexpectedly deep and wide portrait of not just a family but an entire estate's worth of people.  Rather than focus on drama and scandal, Cooke makes the excellent decision to zero in on her characters' inner lives.  As a result, characters both major and minor leap off the page, and much to Cooke's credit she manages to make very nearly all of her cast sympathetic to readers who might not agree with their actions but who might well commiserate with their feelings and motivations.  If you are a lover of historical fiction or can appreciate a few great character studies, you'll find much to enjoy in Rutherford Park.  Recommended!

(Thanks to the publisher, Berkley Publishing Group/Penguin, for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.)

Loose Leafing: Currently

It seems I haven't afflicted you so much with my personal rambling lately, so I lifted this "currently" thing that all the cool kids are doing on Sundays anymore (like Kim and Suey and everybody) and have tweaked it to my liking.

Time:  9:00 PM Sunday night (yeah, I'm totally late, but it's never too late to be current, am I right?)

Place:  My kitchen table (the desk is currently being hogged)

Consuming: For lunch, I was exploring my new appreciation for sushi.  Okay, I come from rural central Pennsylvania, I am a way late comer to sushi.  Happily, a fancy new hibachi steakhouse opened in our humble little town recently, and Sundays are half-priced sushi days, so you can take a chance on new things without wasting a ton of money.  Philadelphia Roll is my stand-by, but I decided to branch out and try a Volcano Roll today, but we think maybe they brought me a Godzilla Roll instead.  So I ate that, and I quite liked it.  I see way more sushi in my future.   Then, we had steaks on the grill for dinner.  (Why yes, I am living the high life these days, thankyouverymuch).

Reading:  I just started Stargazey Point by Shelley Noble.  Okay, looking back, I might have picked this from William Morrow Paperback's blogger outreach e-mail simply because the cover is just so pretty.  Which is a good way to choose books, of course.  The jury is still out on the book itself.  But, I mean, come on.  Look at that cover!  Pretty!!

Listening:  I am 100% addicted to Spotify.  I have this swell catch-all playlist that has just about any random song that comes to my head lumped all together, and it is....how you say...quite eclectic when listened to on shuffle, which I quite love.  This week's theme in adding to the ridiculous playlist?  High school nostalgia!

Watching:  Speaking of being 100% addicted, why oh why did it take me until last month to finally start watching Breaking Bad?  Seriously (Wait, is my boss here?  I mean, seriously but not seriously, okay?), I am on the point of calling off work a couple of days this week to catch up with it before the last season starts. Also, nothing I do seems as important as watching another episode.  Reading?  Eh.  Sleeping?  Meh.  Working?  Oh definitely not.   That's right.  This just in:  TV show about cooking meth is dangerously addictive.  Cue ironic laughter.

Buying: A new mattress, at last!  (and embarrassing quantities of cheap e-books, but that goes without saying).  Next hurdle, cleaning up my dump room for when it gets delivered on Tuesday so that I won't shame myself and everyone who lives with me.  If I survive "Attack of the Killer Underbed Dust Bunnies," maybe I can live the good life for another week...  Maybe.

Not Buying:  The services of my chiropractor every week.  *crosses fingers*

I'd love to stay and chat some more, but really, all this is keeping me from the next episode of Breaking Bad.   =P

The "I Finally Read It!" Reviewlettes

Greetings all, we interrupt the shameless over-buying of cheap books for...some reading!  No, wait.  *analyzes several teetering piles of books looming over just the desk*  Surely that can't be right.  We interrupt the continuous browsing of the Kindle deals page for...some vacationing!  Wait, no, the vacationing appears to over.  I believe this place might be my home...  Okay, one more time, we interrupt the continuous cataloging of new bookly acquisitions for...some blogging!  Ah ha!  Yes, some blogging.  I do that once or twice a month, and considering that the looming pile of books begging for bloggish attention is threatening to topple onto and destroy my computer thus severing my connection from the book blogosphere forever for a couple minutes, it's probably time to re-assume my secret book blogger identity and write about them before they rebel.

It seems that much of this year that I haven't dedicated to reading brand-spanking new books, I've been reading all the books that it seems like nary a soul has failed to read except for me.  What with how I am among the last few people on the earth to enjoy these three selections, I figured a few reviewlettes are in order, if only so I can remember the books I'm reading.  Frankly, it's surprised me how quickly being a barely there blogger has plunged me into complete inability keep the books that I'm reading in my head for more than a few minutes.  I'm all like, "Wait, what did I just read last month?"  Whoa, that's bad news.  So anyway, without further digression, reviewlettes of some books you probably have already read!

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green - I know, right?  Not only had I not gotten around to reading this until this summer,  this is also the first book I've read by John Green.  Oh, the multitude of reading sins being atoned for with just this one book!  Anyhow, if you've been living in a nuclear fallout bunker or something for the last year, I should probably mention that this is the book about the teenagers with the cancer, and I loved it as much as all the people who love it loved it.  Green's terminal teens, Hazel and Gus, are almost unrealistically precocious in a way that I just ate up.  The Fault In Our Stars is full of lovable characters, romance, intelligent unpreachy contemplations of mortality, an exploration of how there is plenty of truth to be gleaned from fiction, and also, sadness.  Of course, sadness.  I had to practically speed read the last third of the book on a Monday night so that I wouldn't be caught weeping at my cafeteria table at work on Tuesday afternoon.  Rather, I wept embarrassingly much from the safety of my own home.  I laughed, I cried, I loved it.  I've already recommended it to a few real life friends who are also behind the times, and I recommend it also to you, last person on the earth to read The Fault In Our Stars!

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson  - Can I just say that I think the problem with my reading last year is that for some infernal and unexplainable reason I pretty much just abandoned YA fiction?  Truly, I swear, my love for YA grows with every year I grow to be less of a, well, young adult.  There is something about charging through a good piece of YA that is totally refreshing to my readerly soul, and it's not because I have a craving for something simple because YA these days is smart, just in a different way than "grown-up" fiction is smart.  Anywhoodle, The Adoration of Jenna Fox.  I didn't love this like I loved The Fault In Our Stars, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading it just the same.  Again, in case you yourself are just emerging from a coma that might have prevented you from reading this book before me, this one's about a girl who wakes up from a coma in a decidedly more technologically advanced future, and as she tries to recall who she was before a tragic accident, begins to discover that she's not quite all of the person she used to be.   Jenna Fox's world is interesting because it seems like just a mildly tweaked version of the world today wherein bio-ethically questionable technological advances have led us into both the miraculous and the catastrophic.  As Jenna unravels the secrets behind her post-accident life, Pearson gets to present a lot of very interesting bio-ethical quandaries involving life and death and where the true essence of a person lies.  The Adoration of Jenna Fox is an excellently paced and compelling story of how much you would do to save someone you love.


The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey - Last but not least, a book which has an intended audience of...adults!  I grabbed a copy of this at BEA the last time I was there, and I was sure I would love it.  Then all the bloggers started saying fantastic things about it, and I was doubly sure I would love it.  After all, I'm sad to report that despite pretty much every review I've read of this book being unrelentingly positive, I was disappointed.  The problem here, and the reason I've waited so long to say anything about The Snow Child is that I can't quite pinpoint why I was disappointed.  Okay, if you're returning from a lengthy undersea holiday, this book is about an older couple who decide to try their hand homesteading in the wilds of Alaska.  Mabel is unable to have a child and is crushed by the loneliness of long winters in the wilderness.  Jack is crumbling under the crushing demands of carving a farm out of a very challenging landscape.  On the night of the first snow, the two find unexpected joy in building a child out of snow.  The next day the snow child is missing, but a real child has appeared in her place. 

Honestly, I'd like a do-over on this one.  I read it over Christmas-time when things were hectic and I was busy trying to save kittens from dying and a lot of stuff was going on, and I couldn't give myself to this book like I might normally.  It's got all good ingredients - excellent characters, incredible descriptions of the dangerously beautiful Alaska wilderness, the sort of magical realism I'd normally just go bananas for, but it somehow it didn't all quite come together for me.  Faina, the snow child, always seemed more magical than real to me, and her not being quite "real enough" in my mind made it difficult for me to get emotionally involved with the latter half of the book.  I'd still happily recommend it, especially to readers who like a good dose of magical realism, but I can't say I loved it, at least, not upon my first (admittedly flawed) read.

And that's three books off my teetering pile, not to mention my overburdened shelves! 

(Oh, and by way of disclaimer, The Snow Child is the only one of these three provided by a publisher.)

Surely, you've read at least one if not all of these, what did you think?  Or perhaps you'd like to reassure me that I was not the last person in the world to, say, read a book by John Green?  ;-) 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Why look, it's the lackadaisical book blogger back to interrupt your (new) feed readers with yet another (few and far between) book review.  I know I've become a real one trick pony lately, when there are any tricks at all.  I know, I know, all book reviews and no play makes Megan a dull, dull girl, but it seems like if I'm only going to post three times a month or something similarly ludicrous, I should at least be sharing a great book with you when I do.  Good news, though, there is an acquisitions post in the works with my of late book haul.  If you're anything like me, those totally make me drool.  Until then, hopefully I can amuse you with my inability to so much as describe Neil Gaiman's latest much less actually explain why I liked it so much, what with how Gaiman somehow defies explanation and how I am vastly out of practice at describing and explaining things in general.

Adults follow paths.  Children explore.  Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of time, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

So, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  It begins with a man driving away from a funeral and surprising himself by ending up at his childhood home.  As he sits beside the farm pond that the decidedly different ladies at the end of the lane always referred to as an ocean, he recalls with unexpected clarity the momentous events of his seventh year.  They began with the suicide of a lodger in his parents' house and end with his discovery of the true nature of things at the Hempstock house at the end of the lane where things are a good deal more magical than they might appear. 

I hesitate to reveal much more than that because The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a short book that's full of surprises best met within its pages.  Suffice it to say that Gaiman is at his best creating the world of a bookish seven-year-old boy without any friends to speak of, who spends his spring holidays discovering the dangerous and magical things that lurk so closely beneath surface of the humdrum world where he lives.  Gaiman captures the perfect mix of the innate helplessness of childhood with the boy's desire to be the hero of his own story like the kids in the many books he reads.  For the second time this year, I found myself reading a book in which the narrator has no name, and that somehow makes the stories being told that much more engaging.

It's hard to describe what makes Neil Gaiman's books so compelling.  It might be his knack for expertly co-mingling the world we know with magical worlds of his own creation.  Reading Gaiman can be an exercise is whimsy and nostalgia.  His stories put me in the mind of being in grade school and reading James and the Giant Peach for the first time.  It's refreshing to be a "stuffy grown-up" and be allowed, nay, encouraged by Gaiman to believe again that magic both good and evil is never so far away as we might think.  That said, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is no mere children's book, rather it's a book that confronts the real presence of fear in everyone's life however young or old they might be, the inherent dangers of getting what you want, and the benefits of having a hand to hold onto. 

"Dunno.  Why do you think she's scared of anything?  She's a grown-up, isn't she?  Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things."

"Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie.  "That's why they're monsters.  And as for grown-ups..." ... "I'm going to tell you something important.  Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either.  Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing.  Inside, they look just like they always have.  Like they did when they were your age.  The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups.  Not one, in the whole wide world."

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a great addition to Gaiman's work, and, I think, one of my favorites.  It's a beautiful modern day fairy tale that touches on universal feelings with the help of magic and myth.  If you're looking for a story to get totally caught up in this summer, then I highly recommend taking a dip in Gaiman's Ocean. 

(Many thanks to the people at William Morrow for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.)